Hacker News Reader

Comment by ifyoubuildit | Hacker News Reader

> Pivoting the company to be AI-first years ago led to groundbreaking advances across our businesses and the whole industry.

> Thanks to those early investments, Google’s products are better than ever.

Does he really believe this?

Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day.

I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse, or the product being unceremoniously dumped after a year. Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.

Their office suite is pretty impressive, but again I can't trust that it (or my files) will be there when I need them.

View on HN

I literally only hear that Google search is bad from HN. No one else in my daily life - my family, friends, people out at my gym or grocery store - ever complain that Google search is bad. In fact, Google is still the default for looking up information anywhere. It's sentiments like this that make you realize how much of a bubble HN exists in.

OTOH, people have trouble using GMail, google home, or ban YouTube in their house for their kids. Next to no one uses Android, etc.

In some sense, it could seem better to a lot of people just because for whatever query you can imagine there is probably a top N listicle that search will happily present to you, even if it is auto generated nonsense.

> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

That is sarcasm right? I can't quite tell.

US is mostly apple world

"Mostly" being a minor majority, only recently established (September, 2022)?

> For the first time ever, there are more iPhones in use in the US than any other type of smartphone. Citing data from analytics firm Counterpoint Research, the Financial Times reports the iPhone overtook the entire Android ecosystem in June to claim 50 percent of US market share

[...]

> By 2010, two years after its debut, Android overtook iOS to claim the larger install base. Ever since then, Google’s mobile operating system has been the dominant force in the global smartphone market, claiming more than 70 percent market share as of 2022, according to Statcounter.

https://www.engadget.com/iphone-overtakes-android-us-market-...

Android has a 48.2% mobile OS market share in the US as of November 2022: https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

Claiming "next to no one uses Android" is just plain wrong even in the US.

>Next to no one uses Android

Wait, what?

Who's in the bubble now?

American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

This is the answer here. I believe iOS wins the US but world wide Android has a 72% market share.

Even in the US it's like 45% Android, so "no one uses android" is absurd in any context.

Maybe OP is saying nobody important uses android

"I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him." - famous quote from 1972

You need to multiply the market share by the wealth of the participants.

What fraction of the world’s wealth (easier to measure than influence) runs on Android? Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

This is why German and Japanese are often localized before other languages with more speakers.

Not saying it’s right, but just pointing out the reality. The world runs based on the decision makers, who use iOS.

Lol. If you want to talk wealth, then it doesn’t matter again because people with enough money have multiple phones, iOS and Android.

> Elon using iOS has more influence than how many impoverished billions?

Does he buy that many phones? /S

I agree with your point, but catering to luxury users certainly has an advantage. Android, globally, is doing ok.

> American bubble. US people don’t realise the world runs on Android.

It's not even an American bubble. Some sources show that the iPhine market share in the US is only slightly above 50%.

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/north-amer...

This could be a regional experience. Some states have 70% apple market share, with Rhode Island having 80%[0]. The difference could be even greater for smaller regions within a state.

[0]: https://deviceatlas.com/blog/mobile-os-popularity-by-us-stat...

If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small. We can think of this as roughly each of your friends tossing a coin and all of them landing heads. If they do, that's a pretty biased bubble (because it isn't a pure random process, but you also don't have a representative and random sample)

> If Android users are roughly 50% in the US, then the likelihood of knowing zero people that use Android is quite small.

If you mostly associate with people who are on pre-paid cell phone plans they got at Walmart or a gas station, you'll see a high concentration of Android. Among people who are in technology or often purchase luxury goods, most your friends with have iPhones.

Is this downvoted by salty Android users, or actually disagreed upon?

Obviously it's a bell curve - not all Android users are cheap and not all iPhone users are luxary goods providers, but my experience (Australia) reflects this generalisation broadly.

The statistics of a population are not unifrom across it's subpopulations.

especially because of this whole imessage/rcs thing, your friends are extremely more likely to be using the same OS as you.

The fact that somebody writing on HN doesnt know this shows you how low information the world really is.

We generally assume too much about the shared knowledge basis. There would be much less friction if we could improve on that

I thought it was clear the poster was talking about their daily life, and not commenting on world statistics.

To expand on this how often do you have a conversation with someone where you evaluate or recommend search engines? I'm going to assume never because that would be both weird and boring.

I work in an environment where this might come up once a month or something on slack or in meetings etc.

It’s not a bubble. If you want to hear basic opinions from the everyday person then sure, go talk to your gym bros and grocery store Facebook moms about Google. That’s if you’re not met with blank stares. They don’t know what they don’t know.

HN is a much more distinguished community possessing vast technical knowledge. We can approach products from beyond the level of the everyday person and can give deeper appraisal of their worth. Some here may have even built those products, or at least could build a distilled version of them in a weekend for fun.

Because non-tech people don't think about which search engine they're using. Doesn't mean it's not bad.

People care when things are bad. They don't care when things are fine. Not good or great, but fine. It gets normal folks the information they were looking for the vast majority of the time. Whether the results "got worse" is irrelevant when the results are still what people were looking for.

Many continued to use Altavista or something until a friendly sysadmin or another early user showed them Google.

Same with IE, if no one showed them Firefox they just stuck with IE.

> Next to no one uses Android, etc.

Seems like a self-selection bias, possibly based on socio-economic factors that determine who you surround yourself with.

In my personal circles, I only know 1 person who uses iPhone, everyone else uses android.

Haven't you noticed how search results quality has changed let us say from 2007-2013 and comparing recent time period? I used to get the best information, websites, media material that I was looking from the rarest sources on the web, even probably rare to find given my geo location. Today I usually get information not by the quality, but from "the biggest brands" on the web. I was surprised that I didn't find one specific forum in over 20 search pages, but then I had checked my bookmarks and the site was still running and functional and contained what I was exactly looking by the keywords and other possible search factors. These days I just feel I get the information sources that are the most advertised or well branded, but do not reflect the accuracy of what I'm looking for.

it's starting to get really hard to believe that, as people repeat 'wow, search used to be better and now it's trash', remembering only the good parts, rewriting their memories of it, and just having it literally be 'well somebody said it, so it must be true'. 'i remember how it used to be a decade ago', well, sure you do. and yeah, somebody could dig out their search history takeouts and do some kind of opinionated pondering about it, but this ain't it.

and if one wants to experience real search results difference, just switch back to, say, duckduckgo for a bit, and see how many times you just end up giving up and googling stuff instead.

DDG just uses Bing though, it’s bad but Bing was never particularly good.

DDG uses bing only for images AFAIK. Has that changed?

DDG is a reskin of Bing web search.

Google results are markedly worse than they used to be. SEO spam routinely pushes the site/content I'm searching for down/off the page. These sites are often just straight up copies of StackOverflow.

My perception is that search queries need to be much more specific in order to avoid SEO trash as well. It used to be fairly common to find special interest forums when looking for product reviews. Now the first page is almost exclusively auto-generated spam sites referral linking to Amazon product pages. Adding "Reddit" sometimes provides helpful advice but there's often a lack of in depth insight that was present before.

I pondered on this for a while, unsure if my memory was false. Then I switched to Kagi and it felt like Google 15 years ago. I was served the content I was looking for, not the content Google wants me to look at. It's not perfect, but 9/10 cases (and I do 50+ searches a day) it's great, and validates my perception of the quality of Google going down (or less cynically, the likelihood that Google is optimising for the general public, and I'm an outlier).

because the rarest sources of the web were relatively speaking much more popular back then when the internet had about 20 pages in total. The entire scale of the web has been growing x-fold every year.

So what was relatively relevant back then is now irrelevant to a general audience and as a result has been pushed back. You could argue Google should bias search much more towards individual history but that has its own pitfalls, both in terms of results and privacy wise.

Basically blame your fellow searchers for clicking and wanting big brand stuff, Google just gives you what the internet considers relevant.

I blame Google and the third party ad model for profiting from and encouraging the creation of the lowest quality cash grabs. Search for any kind of product review and you're faced with a sea of auto-generated shit, the only purpose of which is to serve you an ad and hope you click an amazon affiliate link. It's a prime example that the "value" delivered isn't value to society or the individuals using the service.

Can't be the whole explanation for why you cannot find them with Google anymore: search.marginalia.nu manages to find the

To be fair Marginalia Search is very much not a general-purpose search engine.

If I was trying to cater to a broader set of use cases and users, I'd probably have more of Google's problems as a result.

Send me your queries to debug if you remember them.

I stopped using google a while ago, but try searching for something unusual, add doublequotes around it and notice how your search engine blatantly ignores double quotes (and even your verbatim operator) in order to inflate results.

This cost many minutes most times and is seriously annoying because the search engine ignores me and lies to me.

Machines shouldn't do that.

In my daily life, all my tech coworkers and zoomer (and older) friends in VRC say it's horrible, myself included. The only people who don't have a problem are it are my very casual-use family members.

TikTok search is apparently better. My version of that is "site:reddit.com", but even that's gotten worse as the culture there becomes more censorious, echo-chambery, and more insane.

Most people I know use Android. I have noticed Android and IPhone users have their own bubbles.

Your second paragraph points that you are living in a bubble as well.

I've heard this over and over on HN in recent years and I simply don't understand it. Almost any Google search I run has just what I am looking for as the first or second choice. Google frequently knows what I am looking for after I type in the first few words of the search! Are HN people not logged in when they search?

For me it is not a problem with ordinary searches: directions, recipes etc, no problem.

But try to find a specific error message from an npm package!

First you get useless results because Google found something it rather wanted to show you.

Then you add doublequotes and realize the Google results are full of utterly irrelevant pages lacking half my keywords.

I hear it often in my circles that search has degraded.

I was wondering and started asking around me, and while they probably don't express it the same we people here do, a significant proportion of the people I asked (~50%) noticed that they spend more time avoiding bad quality connect

You should probably listen to this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-google-getting-worse/

Maybe because we were early power users and knew how well it used to work?

My mother (quite the opposite of a techie) complains about how hard it is to find stuff on Google - especially unbiased stuff that isn't being promoted by a company or individual with a promotional / commercial agenda.

I don't think the issue for this is with changes Google has made, but rather with the increasing extent to which it's targeted by SEO spam.

Maybe because other people search in different places. Events/Businesses: Google Maps, Instagram Trend/Tutorials: Tiktok, IG Reels News: Twitter/Social Media/News Outlet of choice

Google is for searching new sources of information and either it’s instant (google info box) or takes too long which makes a lasting memory about it being painful.

> but search seems worse every day.

Search is a reflection of the internet.

The internet has had exponentially more content recently. There are good content, but there are also exponentially more spammy and downright bad content. It's actually incredible that search can still be functional in such an adversarial environment filled with garbage.

It is a reflection on how google views popularity over usefulness.

Huh?

The biggest signal in Google's site ranking must be user clicks without returns (IE, user found something they wanted, clicked on it, and didn't come back to Google to search more). That would be good at filtering spammy pages, and shows things that are already known to be popular at the top. Rather than using link structure, use user clicks.

That is not the metric used to determine result quality. But if it were, you'd be correct.

What you and other's replying here are suggesting then is a downward spiral for Google's search.

Either Google needs to significantly shift gears or all of us need to look toward the next search paradigm that is not blighted by AI SEO crap.

It's happening more and more often that the first result doesn't even include all the words in my fairly short queries.

I'm thankful they have a warning on the result so that I don't waste my time.

They're also extremely liberal with synonyms. For example, yesterday I searched for "linear cohort survival model." The first result has bolded "general linear transformation model." I can't even tell what "general" and "transformational" are mapping to in my query.

>Search is a reflection of the internet.

Not sure I agree with that, as ChatGPT is pretty close to being a full-knowledge AI. I can ask it things Google fails to find and get a pretty damn good answer. Yesterday I asked it how Ethernet over Coax worked, what it was called, and specifically how it was able to get such high throughput while using only one conductor.

The top results on Google are for Amazon, zdnet (linking to Amazon referrals), screenbeam.com (shallow article trying to get sales), Newegg, Hitron Tech (same as screenbeam), and only then Wikipedia. And the Wikipedia article doesn't even mention CSMA/CA (still relevant for MoCA apparently)

Heaven help you if you have a specific problem with an emerging technology, like VR/SteamVR, specific 3D avatar issues in Blender or Unity, problems with a specific blueprint issue in Unreal Engine, etc.

Knowledge AI is the future, likely with "fine-tuning as a service" based on the collective sum of everything you do online and on your phone.

> Does he really believe this?

I believe it: the Google of 2008 would have been completely buried by the flood of ChatGPT-generated bullshit SEO spam. What they have today is the best version of Google to date, so it's still floating, not just as high as it once was in less adversarial times.

Really? Often, the top links are AI generated spam that, while somewhat relevant to whatever you searched for, sounds like it was written by a high school student trying to pad the word count for a few pages.

It doesn't sound like you're disagreeing.

Yes, Google search results are worse than they were in it's height.

Google front page is a whale of a target. At no point has there been more sophisticated attacks for people trying to hit front page with low-quality content. The position you parent comment took is that Google of today is better at resisting those attacks, and no one version of Google would provide as good results on today's internet.

I believe Google is fundamentally failing at it's mission of "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil". That's not to say that Google Search isn't better at searching today's internet than any other iteration of Google Search would have been.

>and it's earlier value of "Don't be evil".

What do you mean? It's still part of their current values.

https://abc.xyz/investor/other/google-code-of-conduct/

esp. for anything relatively technical. the pages look like they copied and pasted someone else's documentation together.

at this point it's almost always ignore the first 3 hits and go straight to stackoverflow or reddit, or something that's plainly obviously related like python.org documentation.

I've noticed so many domain names are spammy with associated subdomain spam. I'm impressed they manage to get to the front page of Google.

Maybe this is confirmation bias since I have seen a multitude of blogs and threads popping up around this topic but I have clicked the "Page 2" button on Google multiple times this month. I don't think I have to add anything to make that an argument.

> Does he really believe this?

Google Translate, Google Photos, YouTube Recommendations, etc. and many many more are powered by AI. It is included also sprinkled in features such as gmail smart reply, etc.

Google Translate and Google Photos are good examples, but YouTube Recommendations is absolute garbage in my experience. Heck, I'm not even sure it's using any sort of AI because it seems to mostly want to funnel me to the currently most popular videos, not anything similar to the things I actually watch. I mean, it'll recommend new videos from the channels I'm subscribed to, but almost everything else is music videos in languages I don't speak, sports clips when I don't watch any sports, local news from countries I don't live in, and videos from channels like the Paul brothers, which I abhor.

No matter how many recommendations I click "Not interested" or "Don't recommend channel" on, there's still an endless list of completely irrelevant, unwanted content and channels.

Same as with ads:

There's always another pay-to-win "strategy" game, another "revolutionary Japanese chefs knife", some brilliant genius that has made a device that heats your house for free

... not a single remotely useful ad.

I too have tried to click them away as not relevant, but I think Google now sell ads by impression, not by clicks so they don't care at all.

Google Lens, AI algorithms for pixel cameras, voice recognition for Assistant, Translate, etc. We really just focus on Search being bad - a lot of which is because of SEO spam.

When it comes to big companies, Google does have pretty good AI in products. I don't particularly find any mature product bad per se.

In terms of search the biggest problem is less Google itself and more the web. It’s now just a low quality generated content minefield of affiliate links and other hot garbage. I bet they could do a better job of punishing those sites, but it’s a race to the bottom with that stuff. It’ll only become worse as LLMs advance.

I would say you are an extreme outlier. Most people use all these Google products with no problems nor do they seem to share your fears.

While "extreme outlier" is probably true, here on HN many of us are extreme outliers. So while true, at least he's in good company.

I am on the road to de-Google my life, or at least add some backups in case of Google locks me out of my account. On HN I've seen articles about people who have been locked out of their Google accounts based on 1) taking a picture of a boy's genitals intended medical purposes, 2) submitting a chargeback for a Pixel phone that never arrived, and 3) unknown reasons, likely Google's AI incorrectly flagging an account.

Even on HN, you’re in the minority. If you took HN as a representative sample, you’d think Linux was the #1 OS by a long shot even though it’s a rounding error for personal usage. There’s a big old bubble here.

Far and away, the most used OS for personal usage in the world is Android.

If you squint, you can call that Linux.

At this point, I much prefer the results of bing. For the top few results, I don't have to guess what will be on the page, based solely on the pages title. Compare:

"how do mems absolute air pressure sensor work"

bing: https://www.bing.com/search?q=how+do+mems+absolute+air+press...

google: https://www.google.com/search?q=how+do+mems+pressure+sensors...

I've also seen many cases of "unfavorable" news articles being deranked, in google search results, while can be easily found on Bing. The best examples being during the pandemic, where there appeared to be a massive amount of curation.

The results are slightly different but where they overlap the summary/preview/description doesn't seem radically different to me. But I'm not familiar with the subject so maybe I'm not seeing it the way you do. Bing has more images/thumbnails from some of the results so maybe that's it?

For this case, the biggest tell of quality is the existence of a block diagram, schematic, or equations.

But, even without images, the "explore further" recommendations are fantastic, with direct links to research papers. Google seems to not recommend research papers (zero on my results).

Wow. For me the difference is night and day. On my phone, google gives me first two screenfuls of ads, then about the same amount of homepages of companies apparently selling mems sensors, and then some kind of wiki that seems to answer the question, maybe… Bing, otoh, has an explanation of what a mems sensor is and how it works as the first thing on the page. I guess I’ll try switching default search engine now. (For me, google results have definitely been getting way, way worse for a couple of years. At the moment, google search plainly _does not work_ for me probably 5-10% of the time, i.e. I _only_ get ads and unrelated results.)

At one point, my Gmail was my primary email. Losing it suddenly would have created some enormous pain. Since there would be no way of recovering it, short of a Google employee on HN or Twitter taking pity on me, that seemed like a highly unwelcome risk. Even if the risk was just 1 in a million, I didn't want to take that chance. Moved to my own domain name and services which will provide some customer support if there's any problem. That peace of mind is worth the small price vs. Google's free.

Well Search is definitely better for Google's Shareholders. They've always made a killing but must be making substantially more with how degraded the product has felt recently.

I'll believe it when Google Maps stops asking me if I want to get off the highway, drive around in a big square, then get back on at the same exit going the same way.

No google. I don't care if it's 8 minutes slower. Still not tempted.

Many such cases. Every major company (FAANGM) talks big about being all-in on AI, but when you use their products in your daily life, stupid stuff like parent's map example is glaring.

> Maybe I'm just biased towards the parts that are annoying and I end up missing the good parts, but search seems worse every day.

Google product is not the search, but the advertisements. I can believe that Google has gotten better at showing more ads to more people. The services like mail or search are just a way to get people to see that ads.

Sure, but as search circles the drain, they will lose eyeballs.

> I worry about using google products for anything essential due to the risk of being locked out with no recourse

This is my big one as well. As Google refuses to segregate accounts, nebulously AI defined “bad” behavior on YouTube or GCP could lock me out of my digital life.

Its terrifying for anybody ecking an existence in tech (without deep pockets). Those who built businesses around facebook and now twitter know all too well the risks of being a digital serf. But you argue it was their choice.

You cannot do anything techy without exteme dependence on google. This is not how things should bem

> Chat (whatever it's being called that month) is always changing, and not for any benefit that I can see.

I'll actually vouch for the current state of Chat. The Google Chat and Spaces functionality included in the office suite is a great addition. It still has a ways to go to be anywhere close to the level of Slack, but what they have so far is extremely useful for customers that don't want to deal with an outside service. It's improved a lot in a short period of time.

I've seen 2 companies I consult with adopt it and it's currently "good enough" to bypass a need for Slack without all of the pain points of equivalent MS Teams.

Google chat is the worst software I’ve ever used

When did you use it last?

Not grandparent, but I use it every day. It's definitely the buggiest message client I've ever used. Maybe it's because I'm using Safari, rather than Chrome, but problems within the last few months of use include:

* long load times, sometimes I have to retry 15 minutes later. everything else works.

* often shows week old conversations when I open it fresh, eventually updating when it feels like it

* sometimes doesn't scroll to new messages, forcing me to manually scroll, even after page reload

* absolutely massive memory usage (685 Mb for that tab, seriously wtf)

* "open in a popup" used to be extremely buggy, but now it doesn't function at all, not being an actual detached window.

I'm patiently waiting for beeper.

Interesting. One of the small offices I know who’s using spaces with about 30-40 people hasn’t had any complaints except the lack of scheduled do not disturb.

The integration right next to email and calendar that are always open anyway have been very natural, but this isn’t a software company where people are always on it.

I usually use the chat interface in gmail, rather than chat.google.com. Maybe that's related. I don't see why they would be different, though.

The new Workspace suite has a big sidebar where you quickly toggle between Mail, Chat and Spaces (chat rooms/channels). Notifications for all are in one place.

You naturally have everybody in the company available and built in Google Drive/Office integrations are really solid.

The Google Chat iOS app just has Chat and Spaces separated for you too.

I was really surprised at the level of improvement because I needed to find them a chat option with a BAA for compliance, so a good enough solution that was already built in was helpful.

I don’t think it would be good enough for power users or fully remote companies yet, but small-medium businesses who are primarily in office get a solid win.

Every day

original google chat in gmail was fine. since then it's evolved but compared to slack it feels like google isn't even trying.

Yes, I remember being permanently blocked from using Adsense without warning or explanation. As far as I know, I’d done nothing wrong. Nothing even remotely dodgy. Reading your comment reminds me that I should be careful not to rely too heavily on Google Docs and Workspace.

Google is too big to offer the personal touch. They’re a very cold and uncompromising company.

> Their office suite is pretty impressive

Speaking of usability, Quip is much better in my experience. Office 365 is more feature rich. If anything, I think GSuite is falling behind. A few killer features that GDocs should've had since years ago:

- A link to any line. Quip has it, yet in gdoc I have to create a bookmark first.

- Any table is a spreadsheet. I mean, isn't it obvious? Who says one never needs to calculate anything in a table, or never needs to format anything in a spreadsheet cell?

- Embed formula anywhere and refer the result anywhere. Dah! So convenient for technical docs, yet gdocs has shit.

- Latex support. I'm sorry, but gdoc's equation is both ugly and crippled.

- Embed any file. I mean, really, this is year 3202 and I still have to upload a file to gdrive, find its link, and paste the link back to my doc?

Google used to an avantgarde in product design. What happened?

Its weird because there was a time when I would have agreed with him. "Google Now" launched years ago and did an amazing job of predicting things. The little four icon thing in their launcher used to almost always have the app that I wanted at the top.

Now, "Google Now" doesn't exist and the launcher rarely predicts an app that I'm wanting to use next.

Search has regressed too. Google Finance and other web properties are maybe about the same, at best.

And these are just a few of the less obvious problems.

That announcement was meant to be mostly for the shareholders when MS's ChatGPT and copilot is the next big thing which is actually usable IRL.

This is a site for techies, so you and I search for IRL techs from Google that are products of the mentioned AI-first years

We (he and you+me) have different understanding of stuff, and probably Different friend circles and audience. And that is fine.

Hope the good ones out of the 12k find a good job afterwards where their work result in actual real life products.

> Does he really believe this?

This is also a signal to the stock markets that Google is getting onto the AI bandwagon, to milk the current hype around AI.

After the way Google treated Stadia, I can't trust any Google product enough to fully rely on it.

I think Stadia is something they handled well. Refunds to people. There are worse deprecation examples you can find.

> Does he really believe this?

Does S.U.N.D.A.R. really believe anything?

Do advanced holographic CEO chat bots dream of electric employees?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com